Later Versions
During the mid-1970s Bruce Springsteen began performing "It's My Life" during his Born to Run tours. It was preceded by the first iteration of Springsteen's spoken narratives – characterized by music writer Robert Hilburn as "painfully intense" – about how he and his father never got along about anything (that would later manifest themselves in introductions to Springsteen's own songs "Independence Day" and "The River"). The tempo of the song itself was greatly slowed down, to the point where it bore little obvious resemblance to the Animals' original, and renditions could easily run over ten minutes overall in duration; lyrics were varied somewhat across almost every performance. No recording of Springsteen's rendition has ever been officially released, but they have appeared on bootlegs.
The song next cropped up as the closing part of ex-New York Dolls singer David Johansen's Animals medley from his 1982 live album Live It Up. It attracted album oriented rock airplay and considerable MTV video play at the time.
In 1986 American hard rock band Alcatrazz recorded the song on their last studio album Dangerous Games. It failed to chart.
In 1989, the New York hardcore band Madball released a freely inspired, one-minute-long rendition of this song, which became one of their anthems. It can be found in their debut EP Ball of Destruction and album Droppin' Many Suckers.
In 1992, Bon Jovi performed their own Animals medley for an MTV show later released on video as Keep the Faith: An Evening with Bon Jovi; they led off with "It's My Life". In 1995, they performed the medley live with Eric Burdon. (Bon Jovi's 2000 hit "It's My Life" is a different song).
Burdon performed the song live with Roseanne Barr on her The Roseanne Show in 2000.
Read more about this topic: It's My Life (The Animals Song)
Famous quotes containing the word versions:
“The assumption must be that those who can see value only in tradition, or versions of it, deny man’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances.”
—Stephen Bayley (b. 1951)